Shortcuts | From the Guardian | The Guardian

Shortcuts | From the Guardian | The Guardian


Education

English as a foreign language
Dnt u sumX rekn eng lang v lngwindd? 2mny wds & ltrs? ?nt we b usng lss time & papr? ?nt we b 4wd tnking + txt? 13yr grl frm w scot 2ndry schl sd ok. Sh rote GCSE eng sa (abt hr smmr hols in NY) in txt spk. (NO!) Sh sd sh 4t txt spk was "easr thn standrd eng". Sh 4t hr tcher wd b :) Hr tcher 4t it was nt so gr8! Sh was :( & talkd 2 newspprs (but askd 2 b anon). "I cdnt bleve wot I was cing! :o" -!-!-! OW2TE. Sh hd NI@A wot grl was on abt. Sh 4t her pupl was ritng in "hieroglyphics".

Edu xperts r c:-&. Thy r wrrd tht mobile fone spk has gn 2 far. SQA (Scot Qual Auth) has sd txt spk oftn apprs "inappropriately" in xms. Dr Cynthia McVey (Glasgw Cal Univ Psychol lect) sez "Yng pepl dnt rite ltrs so sitng dwn 2 rite is diff ... txting is more aTractve". (Sh is COl).

But Judith Gillespie spokeswmn 4 Scot parent/tcher assoc sez we mst stmp out use of txting 4 eng SAs (Y not hstry, geog, econ, etc? she dnt say). no1 can rite. no1 can spel. "u wd b :-o @ nos of 2ndry pupls wh cant distngsh btwEn 'ther' & ther'". R tchrs a prob? 2 mny tchrs (she sez) thnk pupls 3dom of xpreSn shd nt b inhibtd.

B frank. Do u care? Wot if all eng bcame txt spk? AAMOF eng lits gd in txt spk. "2BON2BTITQ." "2moro & 2moro & 2moro." C? Shakesprs gr8 in txt! 2dA he wd txt all hs wk. May b. Nethng is psble in txt spk.

2 tru. 13yr grl noes wots wot. I say 2 hr URA*! KUTGW! 1OTD yr tcher wll b tching txt. I say 2 edu xperts, 4COL! Gt rl! Eng lang must b COl 2 b xitng. Eat y <3 out! @TEOTD ths is 24/7 wrld! IIN! 01CnStpTxtng. Hax shd tke hEd. I no 10TD Gdn wll b in ext. 
John Mullan

Genealogy

Travails of a literary aunt
My daughter's teacher buttonholed me the other day with "Saw your article in Cosmo. So that's what you get up to on the hard shoulder of the motorway!" She gave me a "you're a dark horse" sort of look and I froze for a second, wondering whether I had temporarily blanked out some misdemeanour that had been captured on police video and somehow reached the public domain.

Then I twigged, and went into my spiel (I have a spiel now - it has happened often enough). "Oh no, that's not me, actually. My niece has the same name. She changed it when she was eight. I'd been writing my children's books for a few years when she popped up doing magazine journalism. People often get us confused." She looked sceptical - perhaps she thought I was using my nickname, Flic, for my racier output and saving the more demure Felicity for my kids' stuff. As a yarn, I have to admit, it sounds pretty implausible. Could there really be two Flic Everetts? Both writing? Both with four children (three girls and one boy), both from Manchester? Yes, yes and yes.

When my niece changed her name I was 18 and hadn't started writing yet. She was eight and, since she had no siblings, I suppose I was her role model. I was flattered, if a little freaked out by her adoption of my nickname. Time went on and I published some children's books under the name Felicity Everett. My niece got married, changed her name and embarked on a career in print journalism. It took a while before I noticed that she was using her (adopted) maiden name for her byline - I imagine on the basis that Flic Everett was different enough from Felicity Everett to avoid confusion. It wasn't. Pretty soon the nudges and winks started: Flic II is successful and prolific, and specialises in relationship pieces, sex counselling and the like.

A male acquaintance rang me up out of the blue, claiming in a Terry Thomas-ish tone of voice to have "just read your article. Wondered if you and your partner would like to come over and have dinner with us some time?" I took his enthusiasm at face value, explained that it couldn't have been my article as I had been very busy writing a novel for 18 months, but that I had this niece... The poor bloke couldn't get off the phone quick enough and the dinner date never materialised. I could only speculate as to the nature of the piece he had seen.

So it's nice to have the opportunity to say to the ex-boyfriends who dumped me and have since been kicking themselves - imagining that if they had stuck around, they might have benefited from my encyclopaedic sexual knowledge - you were right the first time! And to the maiden aunts and jolly children's commissioning editors who are wondering how The Monster Gang and The Saturday Spies sit in my oeuvre beside Sex Tips for Girls - they don't! And to any prospective publishers who may be fortunate enough to consider for publication my recently finished first adult novel: it's racy - but it's not that racy! 
Felicity Everett

Travel

The least bad bits of Brazzaville
I once lived in a concrete ghetto for foreign students in Tokyo. It was a miserable place, with every kind of bored foreigner stalking its disinfected corridors, looking for an American to swap addresses with, a Russian to drink with, a Korean to sleep with. But there was one highlight: the longing songs that Samba - a lawyer from the Republic of Congo - used to sing about his home town, Brazzaville.

I tried looking Samba up in Brazzaville not long ago, but without success - which wasn't surprising. Most Brazzavillois spend more time leaving their city than coming back. During the three civil wars that have engulfed Brazzaville in recent years, at least a million have fled - and most to meaner quarters than Samba, to hunker in the bush at the mercy of rampaging ninja militiamen.

Brazzaville does not make the news very often. Its main problems - civil war, crushing poverty, corruption, Aids - are those of its country's bigger and better-known neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo, just a quick canoe ride across the surging Congo river. In fact, since the Congo changed its name back from Zaire, Congo-Brazzaville has been hard to distinguish at all. But, now, at last, Brazzaville is in the spotlight - having been officially judged the city with the worst quality of life in the world.

As may already be clear, there are one or two obvious reasons for this. And a recent invasion by the ninjas' press gangs has probably done little to entice Samba home. But it also seems likely that the surveyors didn't brave one or two of Brazzaville's regional neighbours: places such as Somalia's capital, Mogadishu - a likely spot to get taken hostage - or Bangui, in the Central African Republic, where their visit would most probably have coincided with a coup. In fact, compared to these hot spots, Brazzaville's not such a bad place at all.

Sitting on the border between west and central Africa, Brazzaville enjoys the culture of both. At Bataclan's nightclub, Lebanese diamond dealers dance with the cream of local prostitutes to pulsing Congolese dombolo. At Chef David, weary French and Belgian residents enjoy arguably the best pizzas in central Africa. And where else but at Les Rapides bar can you watch street boys rafting down the Congo river on great beds of water hyacinth, while taking a little precautionary gin against the virulent local malaria? No, Brazzaville isn't such a bad place: it's much more relaxing than Kinshasa, whose lights twinkle - when it has power - across the darkening river; and certainly a lot more interesting than Tokyo. 
James Astill

Environmental studies

The war on gum culture
Where once a lone hero stood brave for democracy before the tanks of communist oppression, the authorities in Tiananmen Square are now removing a different type of proto-capitalist scum: the 600,000 pieces of used chewing gum, stuck to the square's pavements in a single day by Chinese chewers. A sign of growing freedom, no doubt.

Wrigleys, prime maker of chewing gum, now has a factory in China. The Chinese have worked out that each blob costs 1.1 yuan (13 cents) to remove, and have offered a million-yuan ($120,000) contract - codenamed the 863 programme - to anyone who can discover a liquid that will remove the stuff. So far, though, it is scraping or nothing.

Meanwhile, in the home of freedom itself, the right to chew gum, and to stick it to public surfaces afterwards, is, if not enshrined in the constitution, at least enshrined on the walls of Bubble Gum Alley in the town of St Luis Obispo, in (where else?) California. There Americans exercise their inalienable right to stick their ABC - Already Been Chewed - gum on its walls; the first blobs appeared here in the 1950s, and in the 70s the gum-stickers outpaced the town council's attempts to scrape it off. After 30 years of this, the layer is now inches thick and the whole sticky mess has become a tourist attraction.

Should you get someone else's pre-chewed pink goo on your clothes or - worse - in your hair, Wrigleys recommends applying peanut butter to remove it. Apparently, the authorities in Beijing have not yet ordered a peanut-butter factory.

Other removal methods used around the world include giant steam machines, freezing it off with an aerosol spray or, less technically, applying ice cubes. But who knows for how much longer? For Wrigleys has also filed a worldwide patent for the first biodegradable, plastic-based, and above all - wait for it - non-stick chewing gum. Will the world ever be the same again? 
Julian Champkin